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Houdini both simulation and procedural water effects work to buid trickling rivulets + wetness, technique inspired by Weta FX Wave Curve & Pahi water pipeline. Youtube link #karmaxpu #nukecompositing #houdinifx

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Vu Pham

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18,496 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

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Water simulation has always been the holy grail of FX, requiring an incredible amount of computation to get right. For Battleship (2012), ILM had to reinvent their water systems to allow them to be able to deliver the show with it's plethora of shots in water. The alien ships are hundreds of feet long and therefore displace massive amounts of water. This, coupled with them making aggressive movements meant that hundreds of millions of droplets of water had to be simulated per shot to get a believable look of water interaction. Before their new water systems, artists were only able to get "1-2 simulations done per day", but with the new system they were able to "do many simulations per day", increasing the iterations and therefore the creative freedom and expression for the artists. ILM has since reworked their water systems multiple times, now being more powerful and accurate than ever, utilizing more powerful hardware and more accurate and efficient simulation algorithms. Today, water simulation is something that can be done a lot easier than before, even being able to do it in real-time with tools such as Unreal Engine and LiquiGen. Houdini is currently the most powerful tool for simulating water or any FX at very high fidelities. Check out some FX flipbooks from ILMs VFX breakdown showing their water work below:
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Water simulation has always been the holy grail of FX, requiring an incredible amount of computation to get right. For Battleship (2012), ILM had to reinvent their water systems to allow them to be able to deliver the show with it's plethora of shots in water. The alien ships are hundreds of feet long and therefore displace massive amounts of water. This, coupled with them making aggressive movements meant that hundreds of millions of droplets of water had to be simulated per shot to get a believable look of water interaction. Before their new water systems, artists were only able to get "1-2 simulations done per day", but with the new system they were able to "do many simulations per day", increasing the iterations and therefore the creative freedom and expression for the artists. ILM has since reworked their water systems multiple times, now being more powerful and accurate than ever, utilizing more powerful hardware and more accurate and efficient simulation algorithms. Today, water simulation is something that can be done a lot easier than before, even being able to do it in real-time with tools such as Unreal Engine and LiquiGen. Houdini is currently the most powerful tool for simulating water or any FX at very high fidelities. Check out some FX flipbooks from ILMs VFX breakdown showing their water work below:

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Here's a list of the upcoming features in Three.js Water Pro v3. It's a big update! ✅ Improved Wave Realism — Updated spectrum produces more organic wave patterns. ✅Improve Lighting Model — completely revamped lighting model that produces realistic color changes in shallows areas and allows you to see through water surface ✅Persistent Wave-Crest Foam — Foam lingers and rolls off breaking waves. ✅Multiplayer-Ready Determinism — fixed-step simulation and syncing between clients ✅Sea Spray — attach emitters to boats, rocks, etc. to generate spray as water hits the surface ✅Rain — wind-driven streaks plus water-surface ripples. ✅HDRI Environment Maps — procedural sky has been replaced by realistic HDRI maps ✅Boat Wake — V-shaped wakes with automatic foam on breaking crests, and much more!
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Here's a list of the upcoming features in Three.js Water Pro v3. It's a big update! ✅ Improved Wave Realism — Updated spectrum produces more organic wave patterns. ✅Improve Lighting Model — completely revamped lighting model that produces realistic color changes in shallows areas and allows you to see through water surface ✅Persistent Wave-Crest Foam — Foam lingers and rolls off breaking waves. ✅Multiplayer-Ready Determinism — fixed-step simulation and syncing between clients ✅Sea Spray — attach emitters to boats, rocks, etc. to generate spray as water hits the surface ✅Rain — wind-driven streaks plus water-surface ripples. ✅HDRI Environment Maps — procedural sky has been replaced by realistic HDRI maps ✅Boat Wake — V-shaped wakes with automatic foam on breaking crests, and much more!

Dan Greenheck

61,820 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Watch Abu Nashat install a 54m water well in his yard in North Gaza. He says it was funded mainly by private donors from Qatar, and he intends to let the neighbors use it as well. He says (the pump) will operate on his solar power. As you can see, he has a professional company doing the work. It was filmed over a few days. Note: At the end, when the water was coming out, it was muddy at first, but after running for half an hour it became clear. Uploaded to YouTube on 26 Mar '25. #TheGazaYouDontSee Link in 1st comment
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Watch Abu Nashat install a 54m water well in his yard in North Gaza. He says it was funded mainly by private donors from Qatar, and he intends to let the neighbors use it as well. He says (the pump) will operate on his solar power. As you can see, he has a professional company doing the work. It was filmed over a few days. Note: At the end, when the water was coming out, it was muddy at first, but after running for half an hour it became clear. Uploaded to YouTube on 26 Mar '25. #TheGazaYouDontSee Link in 1st comment

Imshin

54,280 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Higher deuterium in drinking water correlates with higher rates of major depression. Higher deuterium in drinking water correlates with higher rates of type 2 diabetes. This isn't a fringe hypothesis. It's a University of Utah population study mapping deuterium concentration in US tap water against disease prevalence across the country. Correlation — not proof of causation. But striking enough that Tatyana Strekalova — Clinician Scientist at Maastricht University, Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Physiology at Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University — decided to test it in mice. The logic is straightforward. Deuterium concentration in drinking water decreases with distance from the ocean — inland, high-altitude water is naturally more deuterium-depleted. If geography determines deuterium load, and deuterium load correlates with disease prevalence, then what happens when you deliberately give animals water at the low end of that natural range? What her lab found is striking. They used 90 ppm deuterium-depleted water throughout — the lowest deuterium concentration found naturally in drinking water on Earth. Not a pharmaceutical dose. Not exotic laboratory depletion. And compared it to control mice drinking 140 ppm water. The difference between antarctic meltwater and coastal tap water. Finding 1: Aged mice. Two weeks. Depressive-like behaviors measurably reduced They took 18-month-old mice — equivalent to very old age, approaching maximum mouse lifespan. These mice displayed measurable depressive behaviors: Anhedonia — loss of sensitivity to reward, measured by reduced preference for sweet water. Increased helplessness behavior. Reduced novelty exploration. Impaired hippocampus-dependent memory. After two weeks on 90 ppm DDW? Sucrose preference increased — anhedonia reversed. Helplessness behavior significantly reduced. Novelty exploration improved. Hippocampal memory improved. Two weeks. Naturally occurring low-deuterium water. Measurable reversal across four independent behavioral markers. Finding 2: DDW matched antidepressant effect in stressed young mice They used a chronic stress model in young mice — predator scent, restraint stress, tail suspension. This reliably induces anhedonia in susceptible mice. Then they divided mice into three groups: normal water at 140 ppm, DDW at 90 ppm, and citalopram — a standard SSRI antidepressant. DDW produced rescue of sucrose preference comparable to citalopram. Helplessness behavior was also rescued comparably. Serotonin transporter expression — one of the key molecular targets of SSRIs — was rescued by both citalopram and DDW. This is mouse data. Direct translation to humans requires clinical trials. But the mechanism convergence is a legitimate finding. Finding 3: DDW normalized REM sleep in stressed mice Depression is the only psychiatric disorder diagnosable by a specific sleep architecture change — increased REM sleep. It's a biological marker, not a subjective report. Stressed mice showed increased REM sleep — the biological depression signature. DDW normalized REM sleep. Slow-wave sleep and wakefulness also improved. Finding 4: DDW protected against western diet-induced cognitive impairment and glucose dysregulation They used 12-month-old female mice on a standardized western diet — high saturated fat, high sugar, high cholesterol. Western diet produced: impaired glucose tolerance, brain inflammation, reduced mitochondrial markers in brain and liver, liver steatosis — fat accumulation in the liver — impaired object recognition memory, and impaired hippocampal memory. DDW at 90 ppm on western diet: Prevented glucose tolerance impairment despite continued western diet. Improved object recognition memory. Improved hippocampal memory in old mice. Did not improve liver steatosis. The liver finding matters. DDW protected the brain and metabolic glucose handling but did not reverse the liver damage. Strekalova’s interpretation: DDW is counteracting brain inflammation driven by damage elsewhere in the body — not fixing the damage itself. Finding 5: Deuterium-enriched water (180 ppm) did the opposite They tested the reverse — 180 ppm water, equivalent to what you would find in evaporative pools in the Sahara. Results on aged mice with western diet: Novelty exploration clearly suppressed. Hippocampus-dependent memory suppressed. Strekalova describes this as a surprise finding. 90 ppm sits at the low end of natural drinking water on Earth. 180 ppm sits at the high end of what occurs in extreme arid environments. The difference between them produced measurable opposing effects on memory and cognition in aged mice. Gene expression — deuterium sits upstream of circadian biology In both the aging model and the stress model, DDW altered gene expression in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Affected categories: DNA repair, oxidative stress response, immune regulation, mitochondrial function, cellular plasticity, aging-related genes. And one finding that connects directly to everything else: Per2. Per2 is a core circadian clock gene. DDW affecting its expression means deuterium content influences circadian biology at the gene level. Deuterium doesn't just affect cancer cells and mitochondrial efficiency. It sits upstream of the circadian system. The implication The deuterium content of your water varies by geography. Antarctic water versus coastal tap water. The difference is measurable. The biological effects in these models are measurable and opposing. Most people optimizing their health are tracking sleep, sunlight, training, and nutrition. Nobody told them deuterium was also on the list.
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Higher deuterium in drinking water correlates with higher rates of major depression. Higher deuterium in drinking water correlates with higher rates of type 2 diabetes. This isn't a fringe hypothesis. It's a University of Utah population study mapping deuterium concentration in US tap water against disease prevalence across the country. Correlation — not proof of causation. But striking enough that Tatyana Strekalova — Clinician Scientist at Maastricht University, Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Physiology at Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University — decided to test it in mice. The logic is straightforward. Deuterium concentration in drinking water decreases with distance from the ocean — inland, high-altitude water is naturally more deuterium-depleted. If geography determines deuterium load, and deuterium load correlates with disease prevalence, then what happens when you deliberately give animals water at the low end of that natural range? What her lab found is striking. They used 90 ppm deuterium-depleted water throughout — the lowest deuterium concentration found naturally in drinking water on Earth. Not a pharmaceutical dose. Not exotic laboratory depletion. And compared it to control mice drinking 140 ppm water. The difference between antarctic meltwater and coastal tap water. Finding 1: Aged mice. Two weeks. Depressive-like behaviors measurably reduced They took 18-month-old mice — equivalent to very old age, approaching maximum mouse lifespan. These mice displayed measurable depressive behaviors: Anhedonia — loss of sensitivity to reward, measured by reduced preference for sweet water. Increased helplessness behavior. Reduced novelty exploration. Impaired hippocampus-dependent memory. After two weeks on 90 ppm DDW? Sucrose preference increased — anhedonia reversed. Helplessness behavior significantly reduced. Novelty exploration improved. Hippocampal memory improved. Two weeks. Naturally occurring low-deuterium water. Measurable reversal across four independent behavioral markers. Finding 2: DDW matched antidepressant effect in stressed young mice They used a chronic stress model in young mice — predator scent, restraint stress, tail suspension. This reliably induces anhedonia in susceptible mice. Then they divided mice into three groups: normal water at 140 ppm, DDW at 90 ppm, and citalopram — a standard SSRI antidepressant. DDW produced rescue of sucrose preference comparable to citalopram. Helplessness behavior was also rescued comparably. Serotonin transporter expression — one of the key molecular targets of SSRIs — was rescued by both citalopram and DDW. This is mouse data. Direct translation to humans requires clinical trials. But the mechanism convergence is a legitimate finding. Finding 3: DDW normalized REM sleep in stressed mice Depression is the only psychiatric disorder diagnosable by a specific sleep architecture change — increased REM sleep. It's a biological marker, not a subjective report. Stressed mice showed increased REM sleep — the biological depression signature. DDW normalized REM sleep. Slow-wave sleep and wakefulness also improved. Finding 4: DDW protected against western diet-induced cognitive impairment and glucose dysregulation They used 12-month-old female mice on a standardized western diet — high saturated fat, high sugar, high cholesterol. Western diet produced: impaired glucose tolerance, brain inflammation, reduced mitochondrial markers in brain and liver, liver steatosis — fat accumulation in the liver — impaired object recognition memory, and impaired hippocampal memory. DDW at 90 ppm on western diet: Prevented glucose tolerance impairment despite continued western diet. Improved object recognition memory. Improved hippocampal memory in old mice. Did not improve liver steatosis. The liver finding matters. DDW protected the brain and metabolic glucose handling but did not reverse the liver damage. Strekalova’s interpretation: DDW is counteracting brain inflammation driven by damage elsewhere in the body — not fixing the damage itself. Finding 5: Deuterium-enriched water (180 ppm) did the opposite They tested the reverse — 180 ppm water, equivalent to what you would find in evaporative pools in the Sahara. Results on aged mice with western diet: Novelty exploration clearly suppressed. Hippocampus-dependent memory suppressed. Strekalova describes this as a surprise finding. 90 ppm sits at the low end of natural drinking water on Earth. 180 ppm sits at the high end of what occurs in extreme arid environments. The difference between them produced measurable opposing effects on memory and cognition in aged mice. Gene expression — deuterium sits upstream of circadian biology In both the aging model and the stress model, DDW altered gene expression in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Affected categories: DNA repair, oxidative stress response, immune regulation, mitochondrial function, cellular plasticity, aging-related genes. And one finding that connects directly to everything else: Per2. Per2 is a core circadian clock gene. DDW affecting its expression means deuterium content influences circadian biology at the gene level. Deuterium doesn't just affect cancer cells and mitochondrial efficiency. It sits upstream of the circadian system. The implication The deuterium content of your water varies by geography. Antarctic water versus coastal tap water. The difference is measurable. The biological effects in these models are measurable and opposing. Most people optimizing their health are tracking sleep, sunlight, training, and nutrition. Nobody told them deuterium was also on the list.

no.mind

17,018 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Ardnacrusha hydroelectric station yesterday evening, when ESB was abstracting almost 70% of the flow in the Lower River Shannon Special Area of Conservation (SAC). Water is diverted at Parteen Regulating Weir, and this abstraction affects over 15kms of internationally designated Natura 2000 river. ❌This is not “clean energy” and it is not “powering Ireland”, despite ESB’s claims. As seen in the video, much of the water taken from the SAC is simply being dumped through the spillway rather than used for hydroelectric generation. ⚠️This is a critical period for fish migration. Upstream migrating Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and River Lampreys (Lampetra fluviatilis) are following this diverted water into the tailrace, where they become trapped and are unlikely ever to spawn. Both species are Qualifying Interests of the SAC. ⚠️Downstream migrating critically endangered eels also follow the water into the unscreened turbines. Eels are also likely to get harmed if they pass though this 30m high spillway. They will also be exposed to 'gas supersaturation' in the tailrace and injured and disorientated fish are very vulnerable to predation. ⚠️The white screen on the station visible in the video is related to an ongoing multi-million-euro refurbishment, carried out entirely outside the planning system with no environmental assessment. Water management decisions are being made day-to-day and have varied significantly in recent years. ⚠️The water management ‘plan’ for this station is new, the refurbishment ‘project’ is ongoing, and both are having significant effects on the environment and the Lower River Shannon SAC. These impacts are cumulative with the impacts of the 1920s scheme and required Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Appropriate Assessment (AA). ⚠️Salmon runs on the River Shannon have collapsed, and the entire SAC is being damaged by the unsustainable management of this hydroelectric scheme. The refurbishment was a major opportunity to implement mitigation measures to protect endangered fish, yet nothing was done. However, the key ecological problem on the Lower River Shannon is the over-abstraction of water. No fish pass could ever work with the situation shown in this video for example. ❌The current management of this hydroelectric scheme is incompatible with the legal requirements of the EU Habitats Directive and the Water Framework Directive. ✅What is needed is a formal SAC management plan for this Natura 2000 river, one that balances electricity generation with biodiversity, fisheries, flood risk management, and the needs of local communities.
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Ardnacrusha hydroelectric station yesterday evening, when ESB was abstracting almost 70% of the flow in the Lower River Shannon Special Area of Conservation (SAC). Water is diverted at Parteen Regulating Weir, and this abstraction affects over 15kms of internationally designated Natura 2000 river. ❌This is not “clean energy” and it is not “powering Ireland”, despite ESB’s claims. As seen in the video, much of the water taken from the SAC is simply being dumped through the spillway rather than used for hydroelectric generation. ⚠️This is a critical period for fish migration. Upstream migrating Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and River Lampreys (Lampetra fluviatilis) are following this diverted water into the tailrace, where they become trapped and are unlikely ever to spawn. Both species are Qualifying Interests of the SAC. ⚠️Downstream migrating critically endangered eels also follow the water into the unscreened turbines. Eels are also likely to get harmed if they pass though this 30m high spillway. They will also be exposed to 'gas supersaturation' in the tailrace and injured and disorientated fish are very vulnerable to predation. ⚠️The white screen on the station visible in the video is related to an ongoing multi-million-euro refurbishment, carried out entirely outside the planning system with no environmental assessment. Water management decisions are being made day-to-day and have varied significantly in recent years. ⚠️The water management ‘plan’ for this station is new, the refurbishment ‘project’ is ongoing, and both are having significant effects on the environment and the Lower River Shannon SAC. These impacts are cumulative with the impacts of the 1920s scheme and required Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Appropriate Assessment (AA). ⚠️Salmon runs on the River Shannon have collapsed, and the entire SAC is being damaged by the unsustainable management of this hydroelectric scheme. The refurbishment was a major opportunity to implement mitigation measures to protect endangered fish, yet nothing was done. However, the key ecological problem on the Lower River Shannon is the over-abstraction of water. No fish pass could ever work with the situation shown in this video for example. ❌The current management of this hydroelectric scheme is incompatible with the legal requirements of the EU Habitats Directive and the Water Framework Directive. ✅What is needed is a formal SAC management plan for this Natura 2000 river, one that balances electricity generation with biodiversity, fisheries, flood risk management, and the needs of local communities.

Ecofact

162,119 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

I built a Three.js rendering study inspired by Tiny Glade’s painterly aesthetic, and got it running at 120fps in the browser. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying how stylized games achieve that soft, handcrafted look in real time. Tiny Glade was a huge inspiration, and I wanted to use the browser as a constraint: no compute shaders, no native GPU access, and single-threaded JavaScript. As part of this study, I implemented: - GPU-driven instanced brick walls with procedural noise jitter and elastic build animations - Tree, bush, and flower rendering with billboard card expansion, wind sway, and grow animations - Procedural grass with terrain conformance and interactive push deformation - Animated water with layered noise, interactive ripples, and Fresnel-based reflections - Procedural terrain with slope-aware triplanar materials, dirt paths, and rocks - A 7-pass post-processing stack with TAA, bloom, depth of field, painterly filtering, ACES tonemapping, 3D LUT color grading, and film grain The hardest part wasn’t writing any single shader. It was making all of these systems work together at high frame rates inside WebGL, where every millisecond counts and performance problems compound quickly across animation, materials, post-processing, and scene management. Some techniques in this study were inspired by analyzing Tiny Glade’s rendering approach, while others were original implementations built from scratch from visual reference. That contrast taught me a lot: recreating an effect is one challenge, but designing your own shaders and systems to achieve a similar feel is a very different one. This is a private educational rendering study. Some temporary placeholder content is being used during the research phase, and any public or production version would use original or properly licensed assets. Huge credit to Pounce Light for the incredible art direction and rendering work in Tiny Glade: Three.js #gamedev #webgl #threejs #rendering #graphics #realtimerendering #shaderdev
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I built a Three.js rendering study inspired by Tiny Glade’s painterly aesthetic, and got it running at 120fps in the browser. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying how stylized games achieve that soft, handcrafted look in real time. Tiny Glade was a huge inspiration, and I wanted to use the browser as a constraint: no compute shaders, no native GPU access, and single-threaded JavaScript. As part of this study, I implemented: - GPU-driven instanced brick walls with procedural noise jitter and elastic build animations - Tree, bush, and flower rendering with billboard card expansion, wind sway, and grow animations - Procedural grass with terrain conformance and interactive push deformation - Animated water with layered noise, interactive ripples, and Fresnel-based reflections - Procedural terrain with slope-aware triplanar materials, dirt paths, and rocks - A 7-pass post-processing stack with TAA, bloom, depth of field, painterly filtering, ACES tonemapping, 3D LUT color grading, and film grain The hardest part wasn’t writing any single shader. It was making all of these systems work together at high frame rates inside WebGL, where every millisecond counts and performance problems compound quickly across animation, materials, post-processing, and scene management. Some techniques in this study were inspired by analyzing Tiny Glade’s rendering approach, while others were original implementations built from scratch from visual reference. That contrast taught me a lot: recreating an effect is one challenge, but designing your own shaders and systems to achieve a similar feel is a very different one. This is a private educational rendering study. Some temporary placeholder content is being used during the research phase, and any public or production version would use original or properly licensed assets. Huge credit to Pounce Light for the incredible art direction and rendering work in Tiny Glade: Three.js #gamedev #webgl #threejs #rendering #graphics #realtimerendering #shaderdev

Ibrahim Boona

58,625 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Fun fact: It would take the average PC roughly 138,069,000 hours or about 15,761 years to render Avatar: The Way of Water. Here’s how I worked it out: The average PC in 2024 has 6 cores. The average blade on WetaFXs renderfarm has between 16-64 cores. There is roughly 414,000 frames in the finished film, accounting for half of the film being 48fps and half being 24fps at the final runtime of 192 minutes. Each frame took an average of 20-80 hours to render on WetaFXs blades depending on shot complexity and accounting for the 4K delivery resolution. With that info, we can work out the average: We say that the average Weta blade has 40 cores (average between the 16-64 count). That gives a Weta to PC core ratio of 6.67 We also say that the average render time per frame is 50 hours (average of 20-80) Total render time for Weta: 50 hours x 414,000 frames = 20,700,000 hours To work out how long this would be on the average home PC we must multiply by the core ratio from earlier: 50 hours x 6.67 = 333.5 hours per frame Total render time on a home PC: 333.5 hours x 414,000 frames = 138,069,000 hours, which converted to years is 15,761 DISCLAIMER: This is all an educated guess done for fun based on publicly available technical information about the film and Wetas renderfarm. It does not account for any production optimizations, storage limits etc. The real number could be drastically higher. CREDITS: Video is from WetaFXs YouTube channel:
1:49

Fun fact: It would take the average PC roughly 138,069,000 hours or about 15,761 years to render Avatar: The Way of Water. Here’s how I worked it out: The average PC in 2024 has 6 cores. The average blade on WetaFXs renderfarm has between 16-64 cores. There is roughly 414,000 frames in the finished film, accounting for half of the film being 48fps and half being 24fps at the final runtime of 192 minutes. Each frame took an average of 20-80 hours to render on WetaFXs blades depending on shot complexity and accounting for the 4K delivery resolution. With that info, we can work out the average: We say that the average Weta blade has 40 cores (average between the 16-64 count). That gives a Weta to PC core ratio of 6.67 We also say that the average render time per frame is 50 hours (average of 20-80) Total render time for Weta: 50 hours x 414,000 frames = 20,700,000 hours To work out how long this would be on the average home PC we must multiply by the core ratio from earlier: 50 hours x 6.67 = 333.5 hours per frame Total render time on a home PC: 333.5 hours x 414,000 frames = 138,069,000 hours, which converted to years is 15,761 DISCLAIMER: This is all an educated guess done for fun based on publicly available technical information about the film and Wetas renderfarm. It does not account for any production optimizations, storage limits etc. The real number could be drastically higher. CREDITS: Video is from WetaFXs YouTube channel:

Rassoul Edji

37,819 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

We're proud to showcase some recent real-time work with 3D / 4D Gaussian splatting. In January of 2024 we acquired a full 3DGS commercial license with Inria to allow us to offer 4DGS services to clients around the world. We've spent the last 10 months developing our custom 4DGS software pipeline, utilizing our own Nvidia GPU cluster to batch process 100,000's of 4DGS frames rapidly, combined with our state-of-the-art custom built volumetric capture system(s). We can capture anything from complex character interactions for visual effects shots, or dynamic fast fighting scenes, sports, acting, even capturing and storing memories of family and friends for the future! The possibilities are endless. Our focus is always on high-quality and high-fidelity. We don't cut corners and we're continually striving to learn and improve. The below video showcases some 6-dof spatial captures we took of Henry Pearce's family. These scenes are played back in real-time @ 30fps inside a 3rd party engine running in a 120fps virtual environment. This is a culmination of years of hard work and dedication and we are keen to commercialize this technology with you. Please do reach out if you're interested in our capture systems or our 3D/4DGS processing services. HQ YouTube Link: HQ Vimeo Link: #spatialcapture #vr #virtualmemories #inria #3dgs #4dgs #aeonx #ir #ximea Music "Vision" by megiddo music Special thanks to Aras Pranckevičius 🇺🇦🇱🇹
2:20

We're proud to showcase some recent real-time work with 3D / 4D Gaussian splatting. In January of 2024 we acquired a full 3DGS commercial license with Inria to allow us to offer 4DGS services to clients around the world. We've spent the last 10 months developing our custom 4DGS software pipeline, utilizing our own Nvidia GPU cluster to batch process 100,000's of 4DGS frames rapidly, combined with our state-of-the-art custom built volumetric capture system(s). We can capture anything from complex character interactions for visual effects shots, or dynamic fast fighting scenes, sports, acting, even capturing and storing memories of family and friends for the future! The possibilities are endless. Our focus is always on high-quality and high-fidelity. We don't cut corners and we're continually striving to learn and improve. The below video showcases some 6-dof spatial captures we took of Henry Pearce's family. These scenes are played back in real-time @ 30fps inside a 3rd party engine running in a 120fps virtual environment. This is a culmination of years of hard work and dedication and we are keen to commercialize this technology with you. Please do reach out if you're interested in our capture systems or our 3D/4DGS processing services. HQ YouTube Link: HQ Vimeo Link: #spatialcapture #vr #virtualmemories #inria #3dgs #4dgs #aeonx #ir #ximea Music "Vision" by megiddo music Special thanks to Aras Pranckevičius 🇺🇦🇱🇹

Infinite-Realities

202,783 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Clive Lewis's Water Bill - bringing water back to the people 💯 Please watch, listen or read this transcript. Because this is the sort of leadership Labour needs 👏 Clive Lewis MP He even calls for PR 👏 Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab) Margaret Thatcher’s revolution tore up the rulebook on political and economic management. She rewrote it with a single unwavering principle: that the pursuit of profit would serve the public good, even when it came to vital public services—even when it came to water. We often say that society stands on the shoulders of giants, but giants cast long shadows, and Thatcherism’s shadow looms dark over our water system today. Whether we see ourselves standing on her shoulders or trapped in her shadow, one thing is undeniable: she proved that the world can be made differently. And if it can be made differently once, it can be made differently again. That, as the brilliant anthropologist David Graeber understood, is the hidden truth of the world. It is something we create and can choose to create anew. We can do it better. Today, I want to show this House and this country that water is the lens through which we can imagine something better—a better way of running our economy, a better way of safeguarding our environment and a better way of empowering the public, for whom democracy supposedly exists. But that requires something very difficult: it requires us to break free from the constraints of our imagination and to let go of the idea that this economic model is all there is or all there ever could be. It saddens me to say that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 perfectly exemplifies this failure of imagination. One of its leading proponents has a particular rhetorical flourish they love to use when dismissing calls for public ownership of water. They say, “I’m more interested in the purity of our water than the purity of our ideology.” I love that quote. I love it because it lays bare just how deeply the ideology of privatisation, and all that goes with it, has embedded itself. So entrenched is it within our collective consciousness that we no longer recognise it as an ideology. We no longer see it for what it is: a systemic exploitation of a common resource for private gain. Instead, it has simply become the natural order of things. But how much longer can this go on? Since the crash of 2008, this ideology has been faltering under the weight of its own contradictions, yet its grip on British politics remains vice-like. Austerity, exploitation and corporate price gouging are still treated not as choices but as inevitabilities. Why? Because too many politicians on both sides of the House refuse to contemplate alternatives. For those on the other side of the House—on the Opposition Benches—I get it: this is their ideology. They are defending their class, and I would imagine they would go further still if they could. But on this side of the House, we have no excuse. We should be standing up for our class: working-class people—the public. Instead, we wrap their ideology in the language of fiscal responsibility, economic prudence and stewardship of the economy. But it is not fiscal responsibility when we balance the books on broken backs. It is not stewardship when the ship has been sold off and the crew left to drown. It is not prudence. It is power maintenance. Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab) I hope the engineers can check that the microphones and speakers are working while I ask a quick question. My hon. Friend mentions Members on this side of the House. There are far more of us on this side since July last year than there were in 2019, with a very different approach taken in our manifestos. Does he fear that the shift in tone he is suggesting is one of the reasons that we did so badly in 2019 but so well last year? Clive Lewis No, I do not. We have a distorted electoral system. Bring on proportional representation, because if we had PR, we would have had a different Government in 2019 and most definitely in 2017. Sometimes politicians have to do what they believe to be right and lead from the front. I think we should lead from the front. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind) I compliment the hon. Member on his Bill. To help his argument, there was overwhelming opinion poll support for public ownership of water in 2017 and 2019, and there still is today. Clive Lewis I thank the right hon. Member for his point. I will come on to this later, and I hope other Members will pick up on it, but the fact that the public are way ahead of this House on the issue of public ownership is one of the reasons why so many people are losing faith in the two-party political system. One only has to look at some political parties whose Members are not in their place—at the Reform party, for example, which has a policy of public ownership of water. Yes, its Members will privatise the NHS, but they understand how popular this is, and they are ahead of the curve—they are ahead of us on this side. Neil Coyle Really? Clive Lewis On the issue of water, yes, I would say they are, because whether I like it or not, Reform has a policy for water to be owned 50% by pension companies and 50% by the public. As much as it grieves me to say it, that is a policy of public ownership. They are populist; they are listening to a popular voice. Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis I will make some progress and then give way, and I will also try to keep the volume down a little bit. This is about the maintenance of a political and economic model that was never built to serve the public—a model designed to shield the wealth of asset holders, landlords, shareholders, corporations and, yes, privatised water companies. But here is the great irony: the very greed, recklessness and contempt of the water industry—its excesses—have cracked open the door, and through that crack, we glimpse an opportunity. It is an opportunity to shatter the myth of privatisation’s inevitability, to break free from the narrow, self-imposed rules that have caged our Government’s economic choices, to expose its failures, to challenge its dominance and, above all, to show this country that there is an alternative—an alternative that is democratic, sustainable and run in the interests of the many, not the few. We can do it better. Mr Frith My hon. Friend is making a typically impassioned speech. He says the general public are ahead of us. Where might that same public be when faced with the bill for bringing in the nationalisation he is clearly wedded to? Furthermore, in the event that we do not have to buy the water industry but seize it, the implications of that seizure will cause an economic collapse. At what point will he take responsibility for either of those scenarios when confronting a public who are, he says, ahead of us on this issue? Clive Lewis I will obviously come to many of those points later in my speech, but let me make this point now: I do not believe in nationalisation, and this Bill has nothing to do with nationalisation. This is about giving the public a say over their water. It is about governance, standards and democracy. Mr Frith Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis No, my hon. Friend has made his point. Mr Frith On this point? Clive Lewis No, I am going to carry on and make some progress. You made your point. Let the public— Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani) Order. Mr Lewis, I do not believe I was making a point at all. Clive Lewis My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker; I should have said that my hon. Friend made his point. The clock is ticking. The climate crisis is no longer a distant warning. It is our lived reality. Rising droughts, creeping desertification, depleted aquifers, wildfires, systemic collapse—these are no longer projections; they are the forecast turned fact. Preparing for this future and adapting to what is now inevitable has never been more urgent. The evidence is sobering. The UK’s water resources are under mounting pressure and not just from the climate emergency, but from rising demand and population growth. Experts now project that England could face significant water supply deficits as early as 2034 unless we act decisively. That is not a distant horizon; it is a little over a decade away. But while the threat has grown, our resilience has shrunk, because while the climate crisis has intensified, our water infrastructure has stood still, or, worse, been sold off, hollowed out and left to rot. In the 35 years before privatisation almost 100 reservoirs were built; in the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built. But it gets worse, because in that same period private water companies have sold off 25 reservoirs without replacing one. Instead of investing in resilience, they have extracted value: £72 billion paid out in dividends while pipes leak, rivers choke, and the public pays the price. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) asks how we can afford it; how can we not afford it? That is not mismanagement; it is a betrayal. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country— Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis One second. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country, we must treat it as such: an existential conflict. In that context, the actions of these companies—selling off reservoirs, failing to invest, polluting our water—are not just negligent; they are acts that actively undermine our national water security. In any other existential crisis, we might call that what it is: sabotage. And in a time of national peril, sabotage has another name: treason. Let me explain why this matters to me personally. When I served on tour in Afghanistan back in 2009—not in a boy band—I experienced something utterly alien to me: the gnawing fear of thirst; not the mild irritation of forgetting a water bottle, but the deep physical worry that there may not be enough clean water to get through the day. In Britain, we have been blessed: water falls from the sky; it fills our rivers, it soaks our fields, and we joke about it—it is part of who we are. But in Afghanistan there was no humour; only heat, dust and desperation. There I saw children trekking miles through the desert, not for food, not for money, but to beg for clean bottled water. Once we have seen that, and once we have felt that fear, we can never take water for granted again. We never again believe it is something we can waste or pollute or privatise without consequence. That is why I have brought forward this Bill: because anger is not enough; outrage, no matter how justified, will not fix the pipes, stop the sewage or fill the reservoirs. We need a plan. We need a strategy. We need a future. We can do it better. My Water Bill delivers that. It sets out the high standards our country deserves and the democratic governance our water system desperately needs. First, it establishes clear, ambitious targets to stop the sewage in our rivers and on our beaches, to restore our water to high ecological and chemical standards, and to deliver universal, affordable access to water as a basic human right—a right we have never had before in this country. It demands a system designed not just to extract profit but to adapt, to build resilience in the face of climate change, and to harness nature-based solutions that work with the environment, not against it. Secondly, it transforms governance. The Bill introduces representation for workers and local communities on the boards of water companies. It gives voting rights to employees and customers, so that those who use and maintain a system have a real say in how it is run. Water is not a commodity but a common good, and those who depend on it and pay for it should help govern it. Thirdly, the Bill lays the foundations for a democratic future. It establishes a commission on water ownership to advise the Secretary of State on long-term strategy, looking at international best practice, especially in OECD countries, where public water ownership is the norm, not the exception. Crucially, it creates a citizens assembly on water ownership to bring the public into the process, to deliberate, debate and decide how we can govern this most precious of resources. The public care, but how do I know that? I know because a small fraction of them are in the Public Gallery today, having travelled here from all over the country; I know because of the thousands of emails that have been sent to MPs across the House; and I know because those people will never stop campaigning until this injustice is resolved. They know that we can protect something not by selling it off, but by standing up for it, involving people in its care and ensuring that it serves the public, today, tomorrow and for generations to come. My Bill offers a pathway out of crisis. It offers control, resilience and democracy. It is not just about cleaning up our rivers, but about cleaning up the system that allowed them to be polluted in the first place. Privatisation is not just a problem—it is the problem. We can do it better. I can hear some people on the Labour Benches thinking, “But we have just passed”— Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab) You can hear thinking? Clive Lewis I can now—for my next trick, I can hear thinking! I can hear them thinking, “But we have just passed the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, Clive, so what are you talking about?” Yes, we have, but I am afraid to say it has been watered down—[Interruption.] Sorry, I had to get that one in—it was all going so well. The Act does not live up to what was promised, it does not deliver what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. Do not get me wrong: it is a start. Grahame Morris I congratulate my good and hon. Friend on making an excellent speech and on advocating for public ownership of water and the opportunity to make things better. Does he agree that the mismanagement of the water companies under privatisation is a huge indictment of the whole principle? In my area, bills are way above inflation and huge dividends are being paid by borrowing money. At the very least, should our Government not be looking at stopping the payment of bonuses and share dividends while sewage pollution continues, and we have appalling mismanagement of the industry? Clive Lewis I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I agree with him wholeheartedly and I am just about to come to that point in relation to what the Water (Special Measures) Act does and does not do. It addresses some of those points, but as we have already discussed, privatisation is not just a problem, but the problem, and it is a big part of why so much has gone wrong. Unfortunately, the Water (Special Measures) Act does not live up to what was promised or what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. However, it is a start, and I praise my colleagues on the Front Bench, including the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), who has done so much work in this area. Unfortunately, the Act is not a solution. Remarkably, my Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act does not even define what clean water means. There are no standards or targets—just vague intentions handed over once again to a regulatory system that has already failed us and to the companies that caused the mess in the first place. It says nothing about better governance, and absolutely nothing about the big, fat, humongous elephant in the room: who owns our water? If we do not deal with ownership, we cannot deal with accountability. If we cannot deal with accountability, we can forget clean water. No—we must go further on clean water standards, corporate accountability and what happens when companies fail. Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab) Does my hon. and gallant Friend accept that there is increased accountability in the Water (Special Measures) Act through the fact that many companies in the industry are now rewriting their articles of association to ensure that they are accountable not just to shareholders, but to the customers and users of water? Clive Lewis After 35 years of abject failure, it is too little, too late. My Bill would put the final nail in the coffin of this sorry chapter of our country’s water and water system. Neil Coyle Sticking with the puns, I commend my hon. Friend on his gallons of passion; he is always making waves. He criticises the Government’s legislation, which is obviously not yet in effect, but does he think that the Cunliffe commission will go any way towards addressing some of the concerns he has outlined? Clive Lewis Unfortunately, I do not, because again the elephant in the room—who owns our water—has been ruled out of the Cunliffe commission’s operational process. It cannot actually look at that issue. I have no issue with Sir Jon Cunliffe, but let us not forget that he originates from the Treasury—he probably has Treasury brain. That economic orthodoxy is part of the reason why we are in the place that we are. I do not have so much confidence in the Cunliffe commission, but I do have far more confidence in the People’s Commission on the Water Sector, which is being run by academics and which will report at the same time. I will be very interested to hear what it says. Neil Coyle Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis Those are the reasons why I have brought forward this Bill. The Government’s Act does none of those things, but my Bill does. Take just one example— Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani) Order. I believe Mr Lewis probably cannot hear interventions, because he is so loud himself. Members should intervene loudly if they wish to intervene. Clive Lewis I did hear the intervention, but I wanted to make some progress. Take this one example. Under this Bill, if a water company breaches the terms of its licence with a major sewage discharge, it can forget shareholder payout and piling on more debt. If it does it twice, it is in the last chance saloon. After three strikes, it is out—licence terminated and on its bike—and those price-gouging, asset-stripping, river-killing vulture capitalist outfits will be rolled into the sunset without a penny in compensation. What about those water infrastructure assets that they have been sweating for private gain? They go back into the public realm, thank you very much. If they start whining about debts, do not worry: we will do a full audit of what they invested, what they racked up in debt, what they paid out in dividends and what they stuffed into bloated executive pay packets. I will tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker: I am yet to see a single privatised English water company walk away with anything other than a well-earned spanking and a sharp haircut for its creditors. Those assets will belong to the public once again, and we will not pay a penny more than they are worth. I can hear people thinking, “Where will the money come from? How will you invest in publicly owned water without the private sector?” I will tell them where it has not come from in these past 35 years—I am mind-reading again. Mark Ferguson (Gateshead Central and Whickham) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis I will just make some progress, and then I will give way. I am on a roll. Let me tell the House where the money has not come from for these past 35 years. It has not come from private shareholders or long-term thinking, and it certainly has not come from some mythical well of benevolent capitalism. The private companies have put in less than nothing; in fact, they have racked up more than £60 billion in debt. Thames Water has paid more than £7.2 billion in dividends since privatisation, and is now £15.2 billion in debt and counting—work that out. Now, it is trying to plug the hole with a £3 billion emergency loan that will cost 10% in annual interest. That is more than half a billion pounds a year, just for interest payments, courtesy of our bills. That money will not build a reservoir, fix a pipe or clean a river, but it will keep a rotten system afloat for a little longer. Noah Law My hon. and gallant Friend makes an impassioned case for public ownership—something that, in the right context, I am sure Members on all sides of the House can celebrate. On the point about the cost of financing to the public, though, does he agree that while there are some serious indiscretions in parts of the industry, such as in Thames Water’s case, this conversation about the appropriate financing model would be better entertained at a time when the cost of capital in the private water industry was not lower than the cost of public sector borrowing, on which, of course, we are in a very difficult situation? Clive Lewis The cheapest borrowing in the country, without a doubt, is public sector borrowing. The private water industry, which has had 35 years to sort this mess out, is not going to find investment. It is up to its eyeballs in debt. It is relying on a 50% increase in our bills by 2030, if we include inflation, and that is in the middle of a cost of living crisis. How can we justify that? The answer is that we cannot. Mr Frith The day after the seizure of public assets that my hon. Friend is describing, billions and billions of pounds of debt will come with it. What does he propose to do with that debt, other than refinancing, which is exactly where we are at now with the industry requirement to refinance the debt to try to keep bills down? Instead, he is advocating that the public purse take on that private debt. Clive Lewis At the beginning of my now seemingly rather long speech, I think I referred to a failure of imagination. Ask what Margaret Thatcher would have done when she was faced with similar problems. She would have fought her way through it. She changed the very fabric of our economy, our democracy and our politics, and she made it work. We can do the same, because the public are behind us. They want this to work. Mr Frith rose— Mark Ferguson rose— Clive Lewis I will make some progress. Let us recap, because I do not want to go on too long; I want to conclude, if I can. That money from Thames Water—that half a billion pounds in interest payments—will keep a rotten system afloat for just a little longer. The myth of privatisation is that the private sector will act in the long-term interests of the British public because it wants to turn a profit. That is preposterous, as is proven by the state of our water, and exhibit A is Thames Water. We can now turn to the question of where the investment will come from. Under public ownership, it will come from the only place it ever should have—from us, the public—and every penny of it will go back into the system. It will go into the pipes, the rivers, the seas we swim in and the water we drink. There will be a direct relationship between what we pay and what we get, with no offshore dividends, no bloated bonuses and no debt-laden shell games—just clean, accountable, democratic water. When I was in Afghanistan, every soldier had one critical duty: to stay hydrated. To dehydrate was considered a military offence, because it put the soldier and their team at risk. If someone ran out of water, we did not debate markets or metrics; we shared what we had. We had each other’s backs. As the desert-dwelling Fremen in James Herbert’s novel “Dune” believed: “A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe”. It is time our water returned to the tribe, to the people, to the public. We can do better; we must, and with this Bill, we will. I commend it to the House.
31:07

Clive Lewis's Water Bill - bringing water back to the people 💯 Please watch, listen or read this transcript. Because this is the sort of leadership Labour needs 👏 Clive Lewis MP He even calls for PR 👏 Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab) Margaret Thatcher’s revolution tore up the rulebook on political and economic management. She rewrote it with a single unwavering principle: that the pursuit of profit would serve the public good, even when it came to vital public services—even when it came to water. We often say that society stands on the shoulders of giants, but giants cast long shadows, and Thatcherism’s shadow looms dark over our water system today. Whether we see ourselves standing on her shoulders or trapped in her shadow, one thing is undeniable: she proved that the world can be made differently. And if it can be made differently once, it can be made differently again. That, as the brilliant anthropologist David Graeber understood, is the hidden truth of the world. It is something we create and can choose to create anew. We can do it better. Today, I want to show this House and this country that water is the lens through which we can imagine something better—a better way of running our economy, a better way of safeguarding our environment and a better way of empowering the public, for whom democracy supposedly exists. But that requires something very difficult: it requires us to break free from the constraints of our imagination and to let go of the idea that this economic model is all there is or all there ever could be. It saddens me to say that the Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 perfectly exemplifies this failure of imagination. One of its leading proponents has a particular rhetorical flourish they love to use when dismissing calls for public ownership of water. They say, “I’m more interested in the purity of our water than the purity of our ideology.” I love that quote. I love it because it lays bare just how deeply the ideology of privatisation, and all that goes with it, has embedded itself. So entrenched is it within our collective consciousness that we no longer recognise it as an ideology. We no longer see it for what it is: a systemic exploitation of a common resource for private gain. Instead, it has simply become the natural order of things. But how much longer can this go on? Since the crash of 2008, this ideology has been faltering under the weight of its own contradictions, yet its grip on British politics remains vice-like. Austerity, exploitation and corporate price gouging are still treated not as choices but as inevitabilities. Why? Because too many politicians on both sides of the House refuse to contemplate alternatives. For those on the other side of the House—on the Opposition Benches—I get it: this is their ideology. They are defending their class, and I would imagine they would go further still if they could. But on this side of the House, we have no excuse. We should be standing up for our class: working-class people—the public. Instead, we wrap their ideology in the language of fiscal responsibility, economic prudence and stewardship of the economy. But it is not fiscal responsibility when we balance the books on broken backs. It is not stewardship when the ship has been sold off and the crew left to drown. It is not prudence. It is power maintenance. Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab) I hope the engineers can check that the microphones and speakers are working while I ask a quick question. My hon. Friend mentions Members on this side of the House. There are far more of us on this side since July last year than there were in 2019, with a very different approach taken in our manifestos. Does he fear that the shift in tone he is suggesting is one of the reasons that we did so badly in 2019 but so well last year? Clive Lewis No, I do not. We have a distorted electoral system. Bring on proportional representation, because if we had PR, we would have had a different Government in 2019 and most definitely in 2017. Sometimes politicians have to do what they believe to be right and lead from the front. I think we should lead from the front. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind) I compliment the hon. Member on his Bill. To help his argument, there was overwhelming opinion poll support for public ownership of water in 2017 and 2019, and there still is today. Clive Lewis I thank the right hon. Member for his point. I will come on to this later, and I hope other Members will pick up on it, but the fact that the public are way ahead of this House on the issue of public ownership is one of the reasons why so many people are losing faith in the two-party political system. One only has to look at some political parties whose Members are not in their place—at the Reform party, for example, which has a policy of public ownership of water. Yes, its Members will privatise the NHS, but they understand how popular this is, and they are ahead of the curve—they are ahead of us on this side. Neil Coyle Really? Clive Lewis On the issue of water, yes, I would say they are, because whether I like it or not, Reform has a policy for water to be owned 50% by pension companies and 50% by the public. As much as it grieves me to say it, that is a policy of public ownership. They are populist; they are listening to a popular voice. Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis I will make some progress and then give way, and I will also try to keep the volume down a little bit. This is about the maintenance of a political and economic model that was never built to serve the public—a model designed to shield the wealth of asset holders, landlords, shareholders, corporations and, yes, privatised water companies. But here is the great irony: the very greed, recklessness and contempt of the water industry—its excesses—have cracked open the door, and through that crack, we glimpse an opportunity. It is an opportunity to shatter the myth of privatisation’s inevitability, to break free from the narrow, self-imposed rules that have caged our Government’s economic choices, to expose its failures, to challenge its dominance and, above all, to show this country that there is an alternative—an alternative that is democratic, sustainable and run in the interests of the many, not the few. We can do it better. Mr Frith My hon. Friend is making a typically impassioned speech. He says the general public are ahead of us. Where might that same public be when faced with the bill for bringing in the nationalisation he is clearly wedded to? Furthermore, in the event that we do not have to buy the water industry but seize it, the implications of that seizure will cause an economic collapse. At what point will he take responsibility for either of those scenarios when confronting a public who are, he says, ahead of us on this issue? Clive Lewis I will obviously come to many of those points later in my speech, but let me make this point now: I do not believe in nationalisation, and this Bill has nothing to do with nationalisation. This is about giving the public a say over their water. It is about governance, standards and democracy. Mr Frith Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis No, my hon. Friend has made his point. Mr Frith On this point? Clive Lewis No, I am going to carry on and make some progress. You made your point. Let the public— Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani) Order. Mr Lewis, I do not believe I was making a point at all. Clive Lewis My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker; I should have said that my hon. Friend made his point. The clock is ticking. The climate crisis is no longer a distant warning. It is our lived reality. Rising droughts, creeping desertification, depleted aquifers, wildfires, systemic collapse—these are no longer projections; they are the forecast turned fact. Preparing for this future and adapting to what is now inevitable has never been more urgent. The evidence is sobering. The UK’s water resources are under mounting pressure and not just from the climate emergency, but from rising demand and population growth. Experts now project that England could face significant water supply deficits as early as 2034 unless we act decisively. That is not a distant horizon; it is a little over a decade away. But while the threat has grown, our resilience has shrunk, because while the climate crisis has intensified, our water infrastructure has stood still, or, worse, been sold off, hollowed out and left to rot. In the 35 years before privatisation almost 100 reservoirs were built; in the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built. But it gets worse, because in that same period private water companies have sold off 25 reservoirs without replacing one. Instead of investing in resilience, they have extracted value: £72 billion paid out in dividends while pipes leak, rivers choke, and the public pays the price. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) asks how we can afford it; how can we not afford it? That is not mismanagement; it is a betrayal. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country— Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis One second. If scientists tell us the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and to this country, we must treat it as such: an existential conflict. In that context, the actions of these companies—selling off reservoirs, failing to invest, polluting our water—are not just negligent; they are acts that actively undermine our national water security. In any other existential crisis, we might call that what it is: sabotage. And in a time of national peril, sabotage has another name: treason. Let me explain why this matters to me personally. When I served on tour in Afghanistan back in 2009—not in a boy band—I experienced something utterly alien to me: the gnawing fear of thirst; not the mild irritation of forgetting a water bottle, but the deep physical worry that there may not be enough clean water to get through the day. In Britain, we have been blessed: water falls from the sky; it fills our rivers, it soaks our fields, and we joke about it—it is part of who we are. But in Afghanistan there was no humour; only heat, dust and desperation. There I saw children trekking miles through the desert, not for food, not for money, but to beg for clean bottled water. Once we have seen that, and once we have felt that fear, we can never take water for granted again. We never again believe it is something we can waste or pollute or privatise without consequence. That is why I have brought forward this Bill: because anger is not enough; outrage, no matter how justified, will not fix the pipes, stop the sewage or fill the reservoirs. We need a plan. We need a strategy. We need a future. We can do it better. My Water Bill delivers that. It sets out the high standards our country deserves and the democratic governance our water system desperately needs. First, it establishes clear, ambitious targets to stop the sewage in our rivers and on our beaches, to restore our water to high ecological and chemical standards, and to deliver universal, affordable access to water as a basic human right—a right we have never had before in this country. It demands a system designed not just to extract profit but to adapt, to build resilience in the face of climate change, and to harness nature-based solutions that work with the environment, not against it. Secondly, it transforms governance. The Bill introduces representation for workers and local communities on the boards of water companies. It gives voting rights to employees and customers, so that those who use and maintain a system have a real say in how it is run. Water is not a commodity but a common good, and those who depend on it and pay for it should help govern it. Thirdly, the Bill lays the foundations for a democratic future. It establishes a commission on water ownership to advise the Secretary of State on long-term strategy, looking at international best practice, especially in OECD countries, where public water ownership is the norm, not the exception. Crucially, it creates a citizens assembly on water ownership to bring the public into the process, to deliberate, debate and decide how we can govern this most precious of resources. The public care, but how do I know that? I know because a small fraction of them are in the Public Gallery today, having travelled here from all over the country; I know because of the thousands of emails that have been sent to MPs across the House; and I know because those people will never stop campaigning until this injustice is resolved. They know that we can protect something not by selling it off, but by standing up for it, involving people in its care and ensuring that it serves the public, today, tomorrow and for generations to come. My Bill offers a pathway out of crisis. It offers control, resilience and democracy. It is not just about cleaning up our rivers, but about cleaning up the system that allowed them to be polluted in the first place. Privatisation is not just a problem—it is the problem. We can do it better. I can hear some people on the Labour Benches thinking, “But we have just passed”— Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab) You can hear thinking? Clive Lewis I can now—for my next trick, I can hear thinking! I can hear them thinking, “But we have just passed the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, Clive, so what are you talking about?” Yes, we have, but I am afraid to say it has been watered down—[Interruption.] Sorry, I had to get that one in—it was all going so well. The Act does not live up to what was promised, it does not deliver what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. Do not get me wrong: it is a start. Grahame Morris I congratulate my good and hon. Friend on making an excellent speech and on advocating for public ownership of water and the opportunity to make things better. Does he agree that the mismanagement of the water companies under privatisation is a huge indictment of the whole principle? In my area, bills are way above inflation and huge dividends are being paid by borrowing money. At the very least, should our Government not be looking at stopping the payment of bonuses and share dividends while sewage pollution continues, and we have appalling mismanagement of the industry? Clive Lewis I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I agree with him wholeheartedly and I am just about to come to that point in relation to what the Water (Special Measures) Act does and does not do. It addresses some of those points, but as we have already discussed, privatisation is not just a problem, but the problem, and it is a big part of why so much has gone wrong. Unfortunately, the Water (Special Measures) Act does not live up to what was promised or what is needed, and it certainly does not live up to its name. However, it is a start, and I praise my colleagues on the Front Bench, including the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), who has done so much work in this area. Unfortunately, the Act is not a solution. Remarkably, my Government’s Water (Special Measures) Act does not even define what clean water means. There are no standards or targets—just vague intentions handed over once again to a regulatory system that has already failed us and to the companies that caused the mess in the first place. It says nothing about better governance, and absolutely nothing about the big, fat, humongous elephant in the room: who owns our water? If we do not deal with ownership, we cannot deal with accountability. If we cannot deal with accountability, we can forget clean water. No—we must go further on clean water standards, corporate accountability and what happens when companies fail. Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab) Does my hon. and gallant Friend accept that there is increased accountability in the Water (Special Measures) Act through the fact that many companies in the industry are now rewriting their articles of association to ensure that they are accountable not just to shareholders, but to the customers and users of water? Clive Lewis After 35 years of abject failure, it is too little, too late. My Bill would put the final nail in the coffin of this sorry chapter of our country’s water and water system. Neil Coyle Sticking with the puns, I commend my hon. Friend on his gallons of passion; he is always making waves. He criticises the Government’s legislation, which is obviously not yet in effect, but does he think that the Cunliffe commission will go any way towards addressing some of the concerns he has outlined? Clive Lewis Unfortunately, I do not, because again the elephant in the room—who owns our water—has been ruled out of the Cunliffe commission’s operational process. It cannot actually look at that issue. I have no issue with Sir Jon Cunliffe, but let us not forget that he originates from the Treasury—he probably has Treasury brain. That economic orthodoxy is part of the reason why we are in the place that we are. I do not have so much confidence in the Cunliffe commission, but I do have far more confidence in the People’s Commission on the Water Sector, which is being run by academics and which will report at the same time. I will be very interested to hear what it says. Neil Coyle Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis Those are the reasons why I have brought forward this Bill. The Government’s Act does none of those things, but my Bill does. Take just one example— Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani) Order. I believe Mr Lewis probably cannot hear interventions, because he is so loud himself. Members should intervene loudly if they wish to intervene. Clive Lewis I did hear the intervention, but I wanted to make some progress. Take this one example. Under this Bill, if a water company breaches the terms of its licence with a major sewage discharge, it can forget shareholder payout and piling on more debt. If it does it twice, it is in the last chance saloon. After three strikes, it is out—licence terminated and on its bike—and those price-gouging, asset-stripping, river-killing vulture capitalist outfits will be rolled into the sunset without a penny in compensation. What about those water infrastructure assets that they have been sweating for private gain? They go back into the public realm, thank you very much. If they start whining about debts, do not worry: we will do a full audit of what they invested, what they racked up in debt, what they paid out in dividends and what they stuffed into bloated executive pay packets. I will tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker: I am yet to see a single privatised English water company walk away with anything other than a well-earned spanking and a sharp haircut for its creditors. Those assets will belong to the public once again, and we will not pay a penny more than they are worth. I can hear people thinking, “Where will the money come from? How will you invest in publicly owned water without the private sector?” I will tell them where it has not come from in these past 35 years—I am mind-reading again. Mark Ferguson (Gateshead Central and Whickham) (Lab) Will my hon. Friend give way? Clive Lewis I will just make some progress, and then I will give way. I am on a roll. Let me tell the House where the money has not come from for these past 35 years. It has not come from private shareholders or long-term thinking, and it certainly has not come from some mythical well of benevolent capitalism. The private companies have put in less than nothing; in fact, they have racked up more than £60 billion in debt. Thames Water has paid more than £7.2 billion in dividends since privatisation, and is now £15.2 billion in debt and counting—work that out. Now, it is trying to plug the hole with a £3 billion emergency loan that will cost 10% in annual interest. That is more than half a billion pounds a year, just for interest payments, courtesy of our bills. That money will not build a reservoir, fix a pipe or clean a river, but it will keep a rotten system afloat for a little longer. Noah Law My hon. and gallant Friend makes an impassioned case for public ownership—something that, in the right context, I am sure Members on all sides of the House can celebrate. On the point about the cost of financing to the public, though, does he agree that while there are some serious indiscretions in parts of the industry, such as in Thames Water’s case, this conversation about the appropriate financing model would be better entertained at a time when the cost of capital in the private water industry was not lower than the cost of public sector borrowing, on which, of course, we are in a very difficult situation? Clive Lewis The cheapest borrowing in the country, without a doubt, is public sector borrowing. The private water industry, which has had 35 years to sort this mess out, is not going to find investment. It is up to its eyeballs in debt. It is relying on a 50% increase in our bills by 2030, if we include inflation, and that is in the middle of a cost of living crisis. How can we justify that? The answer is that we cannot. Mr Frith The day after the seizure of public assets that my hon. Friend is describing, billions and billions of pounds of debt will come with it. What does he propose to do with that debt, other than refinancing, which is exactly where we are at now with the industry requirement to refinance the debt to try to keep bills down? Instead, he is advocating that the public purse take on that private debt. Clive Lewis At the beginning of my now seemingly rather long speech, I think I referred to a failure of imagination. Ask what Margaret Thatcher would have done when she was faced with similar problems. She would have fought her way through it. She changed the very fabric of our economy, our democracy and our politics, and she made it work. We can do the same, because the public are behind us. They want this to work. Mr Frith rose— Mark Ferguson rose— Clive Lewis I will make some progress. Let us recap, because I do not want to go on too long; I want to conclude, if I can. That money from Thames Water—that half a billion pounds in interest payments—will keep a rotten system afloat for just a little longer. The myth of privatisation is that the private sector will act in the long-term interests of the British public because it wants to turn a profit. That is preposterous, as is proven by the state of our water, and exhibit A is Thames Water. We can now turn to the question of where the investment will come from. Under public ownership, it will come from the only place it ever should have—from us, the public—and every penny of it will go back into the system. It will go into the pipes, the rivers, the seas we swim in and the water we drink. There will be a direct relationship between what we pay and what we get, with no offshore dividends, no bloated bonuses and no debt-laden shell games—just clean, accountable, democratic water. When I was in Afghanistan, every soldier had one critical duty: to stay hydrated. To dehydrate was considered a military offence, because it put the soldier and their team at risk. If someone ran out of water, we did not debate markets or metrics; we shared what we had. We had each other’s backs. As the desert-dwelling Fremen in James Herbert’s novel “Dune” believed: “A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe”. It is time our water returned to the tribe, to the people, to the public. We can do better; we must, and with this Bill, we will. I commend it to the House.

Farrukh

24,528 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

On Sunday, April 14, 2025, our community kitchen in Tawila - a joint project between Hope and Haven for Refugees, and Darfur Victims Support, was honored to provide meals for 300 individuals, with additional rations added to meet their nutritional needs. I hope you have seen news about ZamZam at some point over the past few days. ZamZam is the largest refugee camp in Sudan, holding 1.2 million souls before the brutal invasion and massacres that began to take place there over the weekend. These are some of the most vulnerable people in the world, displaced multiple times, and largely abandoned by international humanitarian organizations. ZamZam specifically is designated as a region that reached conditions of famine over a year ago. We are called to do more. Estimates suggest that around 400,000 refugees have traveled 60 km under the sun, mostly on foot, with no food and water, to escape the attack on ZamZam refugee camp. They arrive in poor physical condition, hungry and thirsty, exhausted and in need of care. Help us respond to this crisis by sharing our work and donating. Every dollar is quite literally the gift of life. This kitchen, as with all of our initiatives, are volunteer run; your donations pay for meals, not salaries. You may read the headlines and watch the news and feel helpless. Please remember. We are not helpless when we work together. Don’t ask where the world is. We are the world. Link in bio - please check out our work and donate so that we can both continue and expand services. Stay with us
2:22

On Sunday, April 14, 2025, our community kitchen in Tawila - a joint project between Hope and Haven for Refugees, and Darfur Victims Support, was honored to provide meals for 300 individuals, with additional rations added to meet their nutritional needs. I hope you have seen news about ZamZam at some point over the past few days. ZamZam is the largest refugee camp in Sudan, holding 1.2 million souls before the brutal invasion and massacres that began to take place there over the weekend. These are some of the most vulnerable people in the world, displaced multiple times, and largely abandoned by international humanitarian organizations. ZamZam specifically is designated as a region that reached conditions of famine over a year ago. We are called to do more. Estimates suggest that around 400,000 refugees have traveled 60 km under the sun, mostly on foot, with no food and water, to escape the attack on ZamZam refugee camp. They arrive in poor physical condition, hungry and thirsty, exhausted and in need of care. Help us respond to this crisis by sharing our work and donating. Every dollar is quite literally the gift of life. This kitchen, as with all of our initiatives, are volunteer run; your donations pay for meals, not salaries. You may read the headlines and watch the news and feel helpless. Please remember. We are not helpless when we work together. Don’t ask where the world is. We are the world. Link in bio - please check out our work and donate so that we can both continue and expand services. Stay with us

Sadeia

19,409 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

🚨BREAKING: yesterday, at Zelensky's request, Google's European office deleted my personal YouTube channel, which I created in November 2022. It had 75,000 subscribers and millions of views - thousands of Ukrainians who don’t watch Zelensky’s TV marathon tuned in to me daily. The channel was removed without warning, explanation, or right to appeal. Just as Vice President JD Vance Vance described Europe’s censorship - terrified of its own citizens’ voices like the devil fears holy water. On my YouTube, I exposed Biden’s corruption with Burisma, Zelensky’s corruption, and the theft of American aid by Zelensky’s office - specifically, the embezzlement of $550 million through the shell company "Lehmar." I spoke about the SBU concentration camp set up by SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk in central Kyiv in 2022, where they tortured American blogger Gonzalo Lira and Ukrainian citizens. Over 300 people passed through that camp, a fact documented by the UN Human Rights Office. Zelensky instead of targeting those who created it, is fighting me - the one speaking about it. 🇺🇸 I believe YouTube’s U.S. owners need to know that in Europe, Google accounts are being deleted for those exposing the torture of American citizens in Ukrainian prisons, Zelensky’s power grab, and his kleptocracy. The deletion of my YouTube is part of a systematic campaign against me by globalists since 2021. Back then, after false OFAC sanctions imposed by Steven Mnuchin at Blinken’s and USAID’s behest, my YouTube channel with 300,000 subscribers was deleted also. In November 2023, as an opposition politician and Parliament deputy, I was thrown in prison for exposing the truth - about the Bidens’ corruption, Burisma, the war, corruption, and Soros’s influence. Yet even from pretrial detention, I found ways to keep speaking. For videos on my YouTube exposing how Zelensky fabricated a fake Russian interference narrative in Trump’s campaign, I was beaten twice in prison in 2023, threatened, and told to shut up. They failed. Over 16 months in detention, I’ve shown how my trials unfold, the lawlessness Zelensky perpetrates. As a deputy, I’ve highlighted my work. Despite being jailed, my voice rang loud - and it deeply bothered Zelensky, Malyuk (SBU head), Oleg Tatarov, and Andriy Yermak (Zelensky deputies and executives). A month ago, they lost it completely, kidnepped my lawyers who helped me to be public. But it didn’t help also - videos of me being dragged from courtroom by 15 armed soldiers in vests, just for my speaking, were seen by millions on my YouTube and TikTok. Then Zelensky, with Soros’s cronies, had both my YouTube and TikTok deleted within a month. My channel broke no community guidelines or rules. I didn’t monetize it - Mnuchin’s sanctions forbade that. I’m certain this wasn’t a decision by Google’s U.S. office Google or Youtube US office Neal Mohan This is the work of Ukrainian and European offices of Google, long engaged in silencing dissent - I’m not the first they’ve gagged this way. They deleted YouTube by opposition blogger Myroslav Oleshko I remain the only Rada deputy in Ukraine openly advocating for peace. My voice grows louder despite prison, threats, and bans. I know people from White House read me here on X. I’m asking for help from those who defend free speech - politicians, journalists, human rights advocates. Help me get this message to Google’s U.S. leadership. Tag those who can influence the European office’s unjust decision, share this text, spread it. This isn’t just about me - it’s about millions of Ukrainians who want the truth. While I’m at it, please follow me on Truth Social: Neal Mohan TeamYouTube YouTube Creator Insider Sundar Pichai Steven Cheung
4:31

🚨BREAKING: yesterday, at Zelensky's request, Google's European office deleted my personal YouTube channel, which I created in November 2022. It had 75,000 subscribers and millions of views - thousands of Ukrainians who don’t watch Zelensky’s TV marathon tuned in to me daily. The channel was removed without warning, explanation, or right to appeal. Just as Vice President JD Vance Vance described Europe’s censorship - terrified of its own citizens’ voices like the devil fears holy water. On my YouTube, I exposed Biden’s corruption with Burisma, Zelensky’s corruption, and the theft of American aid by Zelensky’s office - specifically, the embezzlement of $550 million through the shell company "Lehmar." I spoke about the SBU concentration camp set up by SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk in central Kyiv in 2022, where they tortured American blogger Gonzalo Lira and Ukrainian citizens. Over 300 people passed through that camp, a fact documented by the UN Human Rights Office. Zelensky instead of targeting those who created it, is fighting me - the one speaking about it. 🇺🇸 I believe YouTube’s U.S. owners need to know that in Europe, Google accounts are being deleted for those exposing the torture of American citizens in Ukrainian prisons, Zelensky’s power grab, and his kleptocracy. The deletion of my YouTube is part of a systematic campaign against me by globalists since 2021. Back then, after false OFAC sanctions imposed by Steven Mnuchin at Blinken’s and USAID’s behest, my YouTube channel with 300,000 subscribers was deleted also. In November 2023, as an opposition politician and Parliament deputy, I was thrown in prison for exposing the truth - about the Bidens’ corruption, Burisma, the war, corruption, and Soros’s influence. Yet even from pretrial detention, I found ways to keep speaking. For videos on my YouTube exposing how Zelensky fabricated a fake Russian interference narrative in Trump’s campaign, I was beaten twice in prison in 2023, threatened, and told to shut up. They failed. Over 16 months in detention, I’ve shown how my trials unfold, the lawlessness Zelensky perpetrates. As a deputy, I’ve highlighted my work. Despite being jailed, my voice rang loud - and it deeply bothered Zelensky, Malyuk (SBU head), Oleg Tatarov, and Andriy Yermak (Zelensky deputies and executives). A month ago, they lost it completely, kidnepped my lawyers who helped me to be public. But it didn’t help also - videos of me being dragged from courtroom by 15 armed soldiers in vests, just for my speaking, were seen by millions on my YouTube and TikTok. Then Zelensky, with Soros’s cronies, had both my YouTube and TikTok deleted within a month. My channel broke no community guidelines or rules. I didn’t monetize it - Mnuchin’s sanctions forbade that. I’m certain this wasn’t a decision by Google’s U.S. office Google or Youtube US office Neal Mohan This is the work of Ukrainian and European offices of Google, long engaged in silencing dissent - I’m not the first they’ve gagged this way. They deleted YouTube by opposition blogger Myroslav Oleshko I remain the only Rada deputy in Ukraine openly advocating for peace. My voice grows louder despite prison, threats, and bans. I know people from White House read me here on X. I’m asking for help from those who defend free speech - politicians, journalists, human rights advocates. Help me get this message to Google’s U.S. leadership. Tag those who can influence the European office’s unjust decision, share this text, spread it. This isn’t just about me - it’s about millions of Ukrainians who want the truth. While I’m at it, please follow me on Truth Social: Neal Mohan TeamYouTube YouTube Creator Insider Sundar Pichai Steven Cheung

Oleksandr Dubinskyi

124,658 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

BREAKING.🚨 FBI Director Christopher Wray has announced that Chinese government-linked hackers have infiltrated U.S. critical infrastructure. “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” he said in Nashville. The threat is partially “driven by the CCP’s aspirations to wealth and power,” Wray said, adding that China wants to “seize economic development in the areas most critical to tomorrow’s economy,” even if doing so requires theft. The Chinese government has tried to steal “intellectual property, technology, and research” from nearly every industry in the U.S. economy, he noted. But the CCP also wants to prevent the United States from being able to get in the way of a potential future “crisis between China and Taiwan by 2027,” he said. Americans are starting to feel the effects of this sprint, he said, pointing to “cyber intrusions and criminal activity” as early deterrence efforts by the CCP. The FBI worries that China will soon attack critical infrastructure, since “these vital sectors—everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology—form the backbone of our society.” “The fact is, the PRC’s targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he said. And, he added, the immense size—and expanding nature—of the CCP’s hacking program isn’t just aimed at stealing American intellectual property. “It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” he said. This risk isn’t new, he added. CCP-sponsored cyber actors "prepositioned” themselves to potentially mount cyber offenses against American energy companies in 2011—targeting 23 different pipeline operators. The FBI warning comes amid the Biden administration allowing hundreds of Chinese nationals to unlawfully enter the United States, while handing out tens of thousands of visas to Chinese nationals, raising fears of "sleeper cells" positioning to attack the United States.
0:28

BREAKING.🚨 FBI Director Christopher Wray has announced that Chinese government-linked hackers have infiltrated U.S. critical infrastructure. “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” he said in Nashville. The threat is partially “driven by the CCP’s aspirations to wealth and power,” Wray said, adding that China wants to “seize economic development in the areas most critical to tomorrow’s economy,” even if doing so requires theft. The Chinese government has tried to steal “intellectual property, technology, and research” from nearly every industry in the U.S. economy, he noted. But the CCP also wants to prevent the United States from being able to get in the way of a potential future “crisis between China and Taiwan by 2027,” he said. Americans are starting to feel the effects of this sprint, he said, pointing to “cyber intrusions and criminal activity” as early deterrence efforts by the CCP. The FBI worries that China will soon attack critical infrastructure, since “these vital sectors—everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology—form the backbone of our society.” “The fact is, the PRC’s targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he said. And, he added, the immense size—and expanding nature—of the CCP’s hacking program isn’t just aimed at stealing American intellectual property. “It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” he said. This risk isn’t new, he added. CCP-sponsored cyber actors "prepositioned” themselves to potentially mount cyber offenses against American energy companies in 2011—targeting 23 different pipeline operators. The FBI warning comes amid the Biden administration allowing hundreds of Chinese nationals to unlawfully enter the United States, while handing out tens of thousands of visas to Chinese nationals, raising fears of "sleeper cells" positioning to attack the United States.

Kyle Becker

1,804,510 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Spatial Film—an immersive 180° and 360° film app we’ve built: After months of self-teaching Swift and app development, I finally turned my dream of having a platform dedicated to showcasing the highest-quality immersive films into reality. I’m not a developer by trade—I’m an immersive filmmaker—but I wanted a space where our original 3D 180 and 360 films could shine, free from the heavy compression of typical platforms. So, four months ago, I dove into coding, and here we are with version 1! This journey has been both challenging and incredibly rewarding, and I couldn’t have done it alone. My gratitude goes out to the immersive and VR community, our loyal Patreon members, and developers around the world who generously offered advice and encouragement along the way. What makes Spatial Film unique? It’s 100% original content, from immersive films to 360° environments, all crafted to provide an unparalleled experience. Some of you might recognize us as immersive filmmakers and educators on YouTube, where we’ve shared tutorials and inspired countless creators on Meta, Apple, Pico, HTC, and even back in the early YouTube VR days. Now, we’re taking advantage of Vision Pro’s stunning display to bring our work to you in the best quality possible. Our journey with immersive content goes way back—we’ve worked with 12K camera rigs like Jaunt, Google Jump, and Yi Halo, creating wild experiences for brands. But despite our efforts, our films were often stuck on platforms with heavy compression, which limits the quality. Vision Pro changed that for us, but it’s taken a lot of work to adapt. We’re still learning, refining, and working hard to optimize this new pipeline. Our hope with Spatial Film is to champion immersive storytelling on our own terms, without big corporations that might restrict artistic freedom. We’re here to bring you genuine, immersive stories—not influenced by financial projections. This platform is small, just me and a Shiba Inu sidekick named Kimchi, and we plan to keep it that way. No outside investment, no mission drift—just pure, immersive storytelling. And the best part? We’re releasing free films every other week, so you can explore and download our latest releases without a paywall. Every film also comes with its own immersive environment, free of charge. If you’d like to support us, you can subscribe to access the full library for a super affordable price, helping us keep this going as a true “mom-and-pop” shop on VisionOS. Feedback is more than welcome as we continue learning, optimizing, and improving the experience for all of you. Thank you for being part of this journey with us!
0:27

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Spatial Film—an immersive 180° and 360° film app we’ve built: After months of self-teaching Swift and app development, I finally turned my dream of having a platform dedicated to showcasing the highest-quality immersive films into reality. I’m not a developer by trade—I’m an immersive filmmaker—but I wanted a space where our original 3D 180 and 360 films could shine, free from the heavy compression of typical platforms. So, four months ago, I dove into coding, and here we are with version 1! This journey has been both challenging and incredibly rewarding, and I couldn’t have done it alone. My gratitude goes out to the immersive and VR community, our loyal Patreon members, and developers around the world who generously offered advice and encouragement along the way. What makes Spatial Film unique? It’s 100% original content, from immersive films to 360° environments, all crafted to provide an unparalleled experience. Some of you might recognize us as immersive filmmakers and educators on YouTube, where we’ve shared tutorials and inspired countless creators on Meta, Apple, Pico, HTC, and even back in the early YouTube VR days. Now, we’re taking advantage of Vision Pro’s stunning display to bring our work to you in the best quality possible. Our journey with immersive content goes way back—we’ve worked with 12K camera rigs like Jaunt, Google Jump, and Yi Halo, creating wild experiences for brands. But despite our efforts, our films were often stuck on platforms with heavy compression, which limits the quality. Vision Pro changed that for us, but it’s taken a lot of work to adapt. We’re still learning, refining, and working hard to optimize this new pipeline. Our hope with Spatial Film is to champion immersive storytelling on our own terms, without big corporations that might restrict artistic freedom. We’re here to bring you genuine, immersive stories—not influenced by financial projections. This platform is small, just me and a Shiba Inu sidekick named Kimchi, and we plan to keep it that way. No outside investment, no mission drift—just pure, immersive storytelling. And the best part? We’re releasing free films every other week, so you can explore and download our latest releases without a paywall. Every film also comes with its own immersive environment, free of charge. If you’d like to support us, you can subscribe to access the full library for a super affordable price, helping us keep this going as a true “mom-and-pop” shop on VisionOS. Feedback is more than welcome as we continue learning, optimizing, and improving the experience for all of you. Thank you for being part of this journey with us!

Hugh Hou

17,540 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

I look up to so many strong women like Gina Carano 🕯 Riley Gaines Laura Zerra & Ashley Lammela . I grew up watching women like Sigourney Weaver and roles like Sarah Connor, so when Chris Cuomo says on the recent Tucker Carlson X interview: "I know too many women who can kick my ass." Well, there is a reason I sleep with a shotgun & a handgun by my side. There's a reason I trained my dog to bark only in the case of an intruder. There's a reason I train to master the use of these weapons. Before I tell you if Chris can kick my ass or not, I just want to say how amazing it is for Tucker & Chris, who were both fired from their old networks, to come together and have a balanced dialogue. It is in the best interest of the majority of the country, who still lean center, to hear topics from both sides & come to their own conclusions. Would you pay to watch a man fight a woman in the UFC? This is my fear, as we continue to marginalize the differences in men & women. We begin to create a future where young men start to believe women are equal. We are building a future where women have no sports & no protection; we saw this play out as kids who received participation trophies become adults. They were told time & time again, not to compete and now they have had a hard time with the brutality of the world. No we are not equal, but we are also not frail & dependent. We can & should protect ourselves via the 2A. So ladies, train hard, learn to shoot, work on your fitness & be defensive. My Bug Out series May 11-16th with Laura Zerra is going to be epic. We will hike 135 miles from Las Vegas to an undisclosed location in Southern Utah, covering topics on starting a fire, land navigation, water filtration & more. Distribution on YouTube & X as of now… Stay tuned.
5:52

I look up to so many strong women like Gina Carano 🕯 Riley Gaines Laura Zerra & Ashley Lammela . I grew up watching women like Sigourney Weaver and roles like Sarah Connor, so when Chris Cuomo says on the recent Tucker Carlson X interview: "I know too many women who can kick my ass." Well, there is a reason I sleep with a shotgun & a handgun by my side. There's a reason I trained my dog to bark only in the case of an intruder. There's a reason I train to master the use of these weapons. Before I tell you if Chris can kick my ass or not, I just want to say how amazing it is for Tucker & Chris, who were both fired from their old networks, to come together and have a balanced dialogue. It is in the best interest of the majority of the country, who still lean center, to hear topics from both sides & come to their own conclusions. Would you pay to watch a man fight a woman in the UFC? This is my fear, as we continue to marginalize the differences in men & women. We begin to create a future where young men start to believe women are equal. We are building a future where women have no sports & no protection; we saw this play out as kids who received participation trophies become adults. They were told time & time again, not to compete and now they have had a hard time with the brutality of the world. No we are not equal, but we are also not frail & dependent. We can & should protect ourselves via the 2A. So ladies, train hard, learn to shoot, work on your fitness & be defensive. My Bug Out series May 11-16th with Laura Zerra is going to be epic. We will hike 135 miles from Las Vegas to an undisclosed location in Southern Utah, covering topics on starting a fire, land navigation, water filtration & more. Distribution on YouTube & X as of now… Stay tuned.

Margaux Alvarez

34,048 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Deuterium — a variable almost nobody tracks — regulates cell growth and mitochondrial function. It sits upstream of cancer and everything downstream. Your mitochondria maintain a lower deuterium concentration inside their inner membrane than outside. That gradient is not incidental. It's a feature of normal mitochondrial function. Roman Zubarev — professor of medical proteomics at the Karolinska Institute, trained at Moscow's elite physics institute — has spent years studying what happens when you disturb it. 1. Deuterium As A Cell Growth Regulator Deuterium — heavy hydrogen — regulates cell growth rate in the range of approximately 30–350 ppm. Earth's normal deuterium concentration is around 150 ppm. When cells are deprived of this normal amount, their growth slows down. To test this, Zubarev’s lab used A549 lung cancer cells — currently the most widely used cell line in biology — and exposed them to deuterium-depleted water at about 80 ppm. The result? Cancer cell growth rate dropped by 30%. Once deuterium concentrations step outside of that 30–350 ppm regulatory window, the effects stop being regulatory and start becoming highly detrimental. For example Mars carries approximately 750–1,050 ppm of deuterium—roughly 5 to 7 times Earth's natural concentration. When terrestrial organisms are exposed to Martian deuterium levels, they show significant survival decline. Zubarev’s team conducted a two-year experiment growing small shrimp in isolated environments where the water was modified to contain ~600 ppm of deuterium. They found that the survival rates of the shrimp significantly declined compared to those grown in normal water. 2. The Mitochondrial Mechanism — How Deuterium Depleted Water (DDW) Actually Works Alongside the well-known proton gradient, there is also a deuterium gradient across the inner mitochondrial membrane. Normally, the concentration of deuterium is lower inside the membrane than it is outside. Mitochondrial lipids are naturally deuterium-depleted. When cells are placed in 80 ppm deuterium-depleted water — lower than the normal ~150 ppm outside — the gradient reverses. More deuterium inside the membrane than outside. So how does this reversal suppress growth? This reversal upsets reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. To try and restore equilibrium, the mitochondria rapidly increase their production of ROS. This sudden spike in ROS induces oxidative stress within the cell, which the researchers identified as the primary molecular mechanism that ultimately suppresses the growth of the cells. This is the anti-cancer mechanism. Zubarev: "We have not invented this mechanism — it's very well known." To prove that DDW suppresses cancer cell growth by inducing oxidative stress they added NAC — N-acetylcysteine, a standard antioxidant — to DDW-treated cancer cells. If DDW works through ROS, an antioxidant should cancel the effect. The result? At approximately 2 millimolar NAC, the DDW anti-cancer effect was statistically eliminated. Then they tested the reverse. They combined DDW with auranofin — a drug that induces oxidative stress. If both work through ROS, combining them should produce synergistic effect. The result? At low to medium concentrations, adding the drug to the DDW created a "double whammy effect" where the cell count went down even further. However, at very high concentrations of the drug, the effect of the DDW diminished, which Zubarev explains makes sense because a cell does not need two overwhelming sources of reactive oxygen species to die. Three-layer validation. Published in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics — the top proteomics journal. 3. The Antioxidant Implication Standard health messaging treats ROS as purely bad. Antioxidants good. Oxidative stress bad. Zubarev's data complicates this directly. DDW works by increasing ROS in cancer cells. Antioxidants statistically cancelled the therapeutic effect. Auranofin — an oxidative stress inducer — synergized with DDW against cancer. Important caveat: this finding is in cancer cells, not in healthy humans. Zubarev notes that normal human cells react differently, stating that normal human cells are much less sensitive to DDW. Therefore, the induction of ROS to slow down growth is a therapeutic mechanism specifically observed in fast-growing cancer cells, not a general effect reported for healthy cells. But the blanket "antioxidants are good" narrative fails here. Context determines whether ROS is friend or enemy. 4. You Are Not What You Eat The standard model of nutrition assumes the body passively absorbs its dietary inputs — including isotopic composition. Zubarev's data shows the opposite. The body actively resists changes to its internal isotopic composition. It defends a specific ratio the way it defends pH or temperature. Isotopes modulate their own fractionation — the biological system selectively processes and separates heavy and light isotopes to maintain equilibrium. The isotopic quality of what you eat and drink is a regulated biological input — not a passive one. For example, the deuterium levels found in the proline, hydroxyproline, and collagen of seals are twice as high as the deuterium levels in the surrounding seawater. Because the isotopic concentration in the seals' biological building blocks is double that of their environment, there is no way to attribute this composition simply to their food. 5. Isotopic Resonance — The Order Underlying Life Plot the isotopic masses and abundances of the elements that make up biological molecules — hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. You'd expect random scatter, a scattered "galaxy" of dots. Instead you find a precise line. Zubarev calls it isotopic resonance. At natural isotopic abundances, biological molecules cluster in a specific ratio that produces the simplest, most efficient molecular conformations. That ratio is the point at which life's chemistry runs fastest. The probability of this pattern appearing by chance is astronomically small. Zubarev — a physicist trained in probability — cannot dismiss it: "This is the line of God, if you want." Life doesn't exist here just because of liquid water and moderate temperature. It exists here because Earth's isotopic composition happens to hit the resonance at which life's machinery runs. Disturb that composition — and the system works to defend it. The isotopic quality of your water, your food, and your environment is not a background variable. It is the upstream input everything else depends on.
3:59

Deuterium — a variable almost nobody tracks — regulates cell growth and mitochondrial function. It sits upstream of cancer and everything downstream. Your mitochondria maintain a lower deuterium concentration inside their inner membrane than outside. That gradient is not incidental. It's a feature of normal mitochondrial function. Roman Zubarev — professor of medical proteomics at the Karolinska Institute, trained at Moscow's elite physics institute — has spent years studying what happens when you disturb it. 1. Deuterium As A Cell Growth Regulator Deuterium — heavy hydrogen — regulates cell growth rate in the range of approximately 30–350 ppm. Earth's normal deuterium concentration is around 150 ppm. When cells are deprived of this normal amount, their growth slows down. To test this, Zubarev’s lab used A549 lung cancer cells — currently the most widely used cell line in biology — and exposed them to deuterium-depleted water at about 80 ppm. The result? Cancer cell growth rate dropped by 30%. Once deuterium concentrations step outside of that 30–350 ppm regulatory window, the effects stop being regulatory and start becoming highly detrimental. For example Mars carries approximately 750–1,050 ppm of deuterium—roughly 5 to 7 times Earth's natural concentration. When terrestrial organisms are exposed to Martian deuterium levels, they show significant survival decline. Zubarev’s team conducted a two-year experiment growing small shrimp in isolated environments where the water was modified to contain ~600 ppm of deuterium. They found that the survival rates of the shrimp significantly declined compared to those grown in normal water. 2. The Mitochondrial Mechanism — How Deuterium Depleted Water (DDW) Actually Works Alongside the well-known proton gradient, there is also a deuterium gradient across the inner mitochondrial membrane. Normally, the concentration of deuterium is lower inside the membrane than it is outside. Mitochondrial lipids are naturally deuterium-depleted. When cells are placed in 80 ppm deuterium-depleted water — lower than the normal ~150 ppm outside — the gradient reverses. More deuterium inside the membrane than outside. So how does this reversal suppress growth? This reversal upsets reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. To try and restore equilibrium, the mitochondria rapidly increase their production of ROS. This sudden spike in ROS induces oxidative stress within the cell, which the researchers identified as the primary molecular mechanism that ultimately suppresses the growth of the cells. This is the anti-cancer mechanism. Zubarev: "We have not invented this mechanism — it's very well known." To prove that DDW suppresses cancer cell growth by inducing oxidative stress they added NAC — N-acetylcysteine, a standard antioxidant — to DDW-treated cancer cells. If DDW works through ROS, an antioxidant should cancel the effect. The result? At approximately 2 millimolar NAC, the DDW anti-cancer effect was statistically eliminated. Then they tested the reverse. They combined DDW with auranofin — a drug that induces oxidative stress. If both work through ROS, combining them should produce synergistic effect. The result? At low to medium concentrations, adding the drug to the DDW created a "double whammy effect" where the cell count went down even further. However, at very high concentrations of the drug, the effect of the DDW diminished, which Zubarev explains makes sense because a cell does not need two overwhelming sources of reactive oxygen species to die. Three-layer validation. Published in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics — the top proteomics journal. 3. The Antioxidant Implication Standard health messaging treats ROS as purely bad. Antioxidants good. Oxidative stress bad. Zubarev's data complicates this directly. DDW works by increasing ROS in cancer cells. Antioxidants statistically cancelled the therapeutic effect. Auranofin — an oxidative stress inducer — synergized with DDW against cancer. Important caveat: this finding is in cancer cells, not in healthy humans. Zubarev notes that normal human cells react differently, stating that normal human cells are much less sensitive to DDW. Therefore, the induction of ROS to slow down growth is a therapeutic mechanism specifically observed in fast-growing cancer cells, not a general effect reported for healthy cells. But the blanket "antioxidants are good" narrative fails here. Context determines whether ROS is friend or enemy. 4. You Are Not What You Eat The standard model of nutrition assumes the body passively absorbs its dietary inputs — including isotopic composition. Zubarev's data shows the opposite. The body actively resists changes to its internal isotopic composition. It defends a specific ratio the way it defends pH or temperature. Isotopes modulate their own fractionation — the biological system selectively processes and separates heavy and light isotopes to maintain equilibrium. The isotopic quality of what you eat and drink is a regulated biological input — not a passive one. For example, the deuterium levels found in the proline, hydroxyproline, and collagen of seals are twice as high as the deuterium levels in the surrounding seawater. Because the isotopic concentration in the seals' biological building blocks is double that of their environment, there is no way to attribute this composition simply to their food. 5. Isotopic Resonance — The Order Underlying Life Plot the isotopic masses and abundances of the elements that make up biological molecules — hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. You'd expect random scatter, a scattered "galaxy" of dots. Instead you find a precise line. Zubarev calls it isotopic resonance. At natural isotopic abundances, biological molecules cluster in a specific ratio that produces the simplest, most efficient molecular conformations. That ratio is the point at which life's chemistry runs fastest. The probability of this pattern appearing by chance is astronomically small. Zubarev — a physicist trained in probability — cannot dismiss it: "This is the line of God, if you want." Life doesn't exist here just because of liquid water and moderate temperature. It exists here because Earth's isotopic composition happens to hit the resonance at which life's machinery runs. Disturb that composition — and the system works to defend it. The isotopic quality of your water, your food, and your environment is not a background variable. It is the upstream input everything else depends on.

no.mind

29,359 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Every week, the average person ingests up to the equivalent of a 5-gram credit card in plastic. Microplastics are now thought to accumulate in the brain at 10 to 20 times the rate as other organs and, worse still, are 10-times higher in the brains of people who died from dementia. Most major organ systems are impacted. While the consequences of the pervasive presence of microplastics are still being understood, the microplastics themselves are carriers of harmful chemicals like BPA, phthalates, and PFAS. These harms are less ambiguous. Acting as a xenoestrogen, BPA, for example, has strong evidence that it affects multiple dimensions of child development ranging from the neurological to sexual and behavioral. Pregnant women with high BPA levels are six times more likely to have a child diagnosed with autism by age 11 compared to those with lower levels. Multiple lines of converging evidence demonstrate both reproducibility and even mechanism: BPA suppresses the aromatase enzyme, leading to anatomical, neurological, and behavioral changes in male mice that mirror aspects of autism spectrum disorder. In a study of 40 healthy young men, all were found to have microplastics present to some degree in their semen. Men with elevated BPA levels have lower sperm quality, reduced testosterone, and abnormal sperm morphology. The cardiovascular system is not spared. Microplastics have been found embedded in arterial plaques, and their presence correlates with a 4.5-fold increase in the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Cancer risk is another alarming aspect. Childhood exposure to phthalates is associated with a 20% increase in overall cancer risk and nearly a threefold increase in specific cancers like osteosarcoma and lymphoma. BPA's estrogen-mimicking properties have been linked to breast cancer development, promoting the growth of estrogen-sensitive cells and disrupting normal hormonal regulation. My latest episode will no doubt stir some anxieties, but were not powerless. Also discussed are actionable ways to minimize exposure by avoiding the worst offenders. Episode 95 is available on X, YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else. Links in comment. Timestamps: 0:00 - The extent of the problem 2:12 - Top sources of exposure 4:01 - Contamination of our water 5:03 - BPA, phthalates, & PFAS (forever chemicals) 7:05 - How heating plastic affects BPA exposure 9:20 - Our unfortunate habit of eating credit cards 11:32 - Microplastics in major organs 14:04 - Crossing the blood-brain barrier 15:00 - How microplastics affect a developing fetus 15:54 - The bloodstream is a highway for microplastics 18:11 - Endocrine and hormonal effects 18:34 - Mimicking of estrogen 23:08 - Consequences in pregnant women 25:34 - How phthalates affect reproductive health 26:35 - Involvement in autism 29:57 - Side effects of prenatal BPA exposure 32:17 - The brain may be a super-accumulator of plastic 34:50 - Human brain microplastic levels are rising 36:06 - Lost fertility in women 38:07 - Changes in sperm quality 39:23 - Microplastics in sperm 40:59 - Why the heart suffers 42:51 - Microplastics in arterial plaque 43:56 - How BPA affects blood pressure 45:58 - Risk of cancer 50:31 - Forever chemicals in sparkling water 53:02 - Reverse osmosis filtration 54:56 - Food-based strategies for limiting microplastics 56:30 - The "myth" of BPA-free plastics 58:14 - Is salt a source of microplastics? 59:18 - HEPA filters 1:00:52 - Choose your clothing wisely 1:01:47 - How to prevent release of microplastics (from laundry) 1:02:32 - Receipts and thermal paper 1:04:17 - Excretion and breakdown 1:06:28 - Sulforaphane for detoxifying 1:08:38 - Can dietary fiber increase microplastic excretion? 1:10:15 - Are plastic chemicals excreted through sweat? 1:11:22 - Do excretion strategies work for "forever chemicals"?
1:14:30

Every week, the average person ingests up to the equivalent of a 5-gram credit card in plastic. Microplastics are now thought to accumulate in the brain at 10 to 20 times the rate as other organs and, worse still, are 10-times higher in the brains of people who died from dementia. Most major organ systems are impacted. While the consequences of the pervasive presence of microplastics are still being understood, the microplastics themselves are carriers of harmful chemicals like BPA, phthalates, and PFAS. These harms are less ambiguous. Acting as a xenoestrogen, BPA, for example, has strong evidence that it affects multiple dimensions of child development ranging from the neurological to sexual and behavioral. Pregnant women with high BPA levels are six times more likely to have a child diagnosed with autism by age 11 compared to those with lower levels. Multiple lines of converging evidence demonstrate both reproducibility and even mechanism: BPA suppresses the aromatase enzyme, leading to anatomical, neurological, and behavioral changes in male mice that mirror aspects of autism spectrum disorder. In a study of 40 healthy young men, all were found to have microplastics present to some degree in their semen. Men with elevated BPA levels have lower sperm quality, reduced testosterone, and abnormal sperm morphology. The cardiovascular system is not spared. Microplastics have been found embedded in arterial plaques, and their presence correlates with a 4.5-fold increase in the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Cancer risk is another alarming aspect. Childhood exposure to phthalates is associated with a 20% increase in overall cancer risk and nearly a threefold increase in specific cancers like osteosarcoma and lymphoma. BPA's estrogen-mimicking properties have been linked to breast cancer development, promoting the growth of estrogen-sensitive cells and disrupting normal hormonal regulation. My latest episode will no doubt stir some anxieties, but were not powerless. Also discussed are actionable ways to minimize exposure by avoiding the worst offenders. Episode 95 is available on X, YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else. Links in comment. Timestamps: 0:00 - The extent of the problem 2:12 - Top sources of exposure 4:01 - Contamination of our water 5:03 - BPA, phthalates, & PFAS (forever chemicals) 7:05 - How heating plastic affects BPA exposure 9:20 - Our unfortunate habit of eating credit cards 11:32 - Microplastics in major organs 14:04 - Crossing the blood-brain barrier 15:00 - How microplastics affect a developing fetus 15:54 - The bloodstream is a highway for microplastics 18:11 - Endocrine and hormonal effects 18:34 - Mimicking of estrogen 23:08 - Consequences in pregnant women 25:34 - How phthalates affect reproductive health 26:35 - Involvement in autism 29:57 - Side effects of prenatal BPA exposure 32:17 - The brain may be a super-accumulator of plastic 34:50 - Human brain microplastic levels are rising 36:06 - Lost fertility in women 38:07 - Changes in sperm quality 39:23 - Microplastics in sperm 40:59 - Why the heart suffers 42:51 - Microplastics in arterial plaque 43:56 - How BPA affects blood pressure 45:58 - Risk of cancer 50:31 - Forever chemicals in sparkling water 53:02 - Reverse osmosis filtration 54:56 - Food-based strategies for limiting microplastics 56:30 - The "myth" of BPA-free plastics 58:14 - Is salt a source of microplastics? 59:18 - HEPA filters 1:00:52 - Choose your clothing wisely 1:01:47 - How to prevent release of microplastics (from laundry) 1:02:32 - Receipts and thermal paper 1:04:17 - Excretion and breakdown 1:06:28 - Sulforaphane for detoxifying 1:08:38 - Can dietary fiber increase microplastic excretion? 1:10:15 - Are plastic chemicals excreted through sweat? 1:11:22 - Do excretion strategies work for "forever chemicals"?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick

402,341 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

I was watching a lecture on YouTube by David Tse from Stanford (see link below), and he quoted his advisor Bob Gallager: "Good theory should prune rather than grow the knowledge tree." To demonstrate what Gallager meant, we takes one idea… "how do you move mass from one shape to another as cheaply as possible?" and watch 200 years of mathematics cut that idea down to its clean geometric core. Monge (1781, "Mémoire sur la théorie des déblais et des remblais") A mound on the left, a trench on the right, and every grain of earth has to choose one destination and stick to it. In the animation that’s strict one-to-one matching: each point marches to a single partner, no splitting, no sharing. It’s beautiful but rigid and hard to work with. Kantorovich (1942, "On the Translocation of Masses"; 1948, "On a Problem of Monge") Kantorovich relaxes the rules. Instead of forcing each point to pick exactly one target, he allows mass to split: part of it can go here, part of it can go there. On screen you see packets of mass spraying from one source cell to several targets along smooth arcs. The problem becomes a clean convex optimisation problem. Brenier (1991, "Polar factorization and monotone rearrangement of vector-valued functions"); McCann (1995, "Existence and uniqueness of monotone measure-preserving maps"; 1997, "A convexity principle for interacting gases") Bernier then shows that, in the most natural cost setting, the best way to move mass always comes from a hidden height function whose slopes tell you where to send things. McCann shows that many natural energy functionals behave nicely along the paths generated this way. In the animation you see contour lines of that hidden landscape, with particles gliding along the most economical path between the two shapes. Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (1998, "The variational formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation") JKO change the question from "what is the best single shuffle?" to "how does a whole cloud evolve in time?". They show that a familiar diffusion-with-drift equation can be reinterpreted as steepest descent of a free energy in the space of probability distributions. In the scene, a blob both smooths out and gets pulled toward the embankment while a free-energy counter steadily drops. Ambrosio-Gagli-Savaré (2005, "Gradient flows in metric spaces and in the spaces of probability measures") Ambrosio-Gigli-Savaré take that idea and generalise it far beyond this one setting. They build a theory of gradient flows on abstract metric spaces: you only need a notion of distance and an energy, and you can talk about curves of maximal slope. Wasserstein spaces become one important example among many. In the final scene the probability field evolves in the top panel while its energy traces a clean descending curve below.
1:12

I was watching a lecture on YouTube by David Tse from Stanford (see link below), and he quoted his advisor Bob Gallager: "Good theory should prune rather than grow the knowledge tree." To demonstrate what Gallager meant, we takes one idea… "how do you move mass from one shape to another as cheaply as possible?" and watch 200 years of mathematics cut that idea down to its clean geometric core. Monge (1781, "Mémoire sur la théorie des déblais et des remblais") A mound on the left, a trench on the right, and every grain of earth has to choose one destination and stick to it. In the animation that’s strict one-to-one matching: each point marches to a single partner, no splitting, no sharing. It’s beautiful but rigid and hard to work with. Kantorovich (1942, "On the Translocation of Masses"; 1948, "On a Problem of Monge") Kantorovich relaxes the rules. Instead of forcing each point to pick exactly one target, he allows mass to split: part of it can go here, part of it can go there. On screen you see packets of mass spraying from one source cell to several targets along smooth arcs. The problem becomes a clean convex optimisation problem. Brenier (1991, "Polar factorization and monotone rearrangement of vector-valued functions"); McCann (1995, "Existence and uniqueness of monotone measure-preserving maps"; 1997, "A convexity principle for interacting gases") Bernier then shows that, in the most natural cost setting, the best way to move mass always comes from a hidden height function whose slopes tell you where to send things. McCann shows that many natural energy functionals behave nicely along the paths generated this way. In the animation you see contour lines of that hidden landscape, with particles gliding along the most economical path between the two shapes. Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (1998, "The variational formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation") JKO change the question from "what is the best single shuffle?" to "how does a whole cloud evolve in time?". They show that a familiar diffusion-with-drift equation can be reinterpreted as steepest descent of a free energy in the space of probability distributions. In the scene, a blob both smooths out and gets pulled toward the embankment while a free-energy counter steadily drops. Ambrosio-Gagli-Savaré (2005, "Gradient flows in metric spaces and in the spaces of probability measures") Ambrosio-Gigli-Savaré take that idea and generalise it far beyond this one setting. They build a theory of gradient flows on abstract metric spaces: you only need a notion of distance and an energy, and you can talk about curves of maximal slope. Wasserstein spaces become one important example among many. In the final scene the probability field evolves in the top panel while its energy traces a clean descending curve below.

Mathelirium

65,705 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it. It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing. That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents. So how does anyone make money on this? Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province. It wasn’t always there. But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally. Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container. It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter. His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking. But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong. His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi) None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants. Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear) That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI. I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006. Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people.. But I admit that we need to think differently. A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole. I think that’s the work ahead of us now. Not just more factories, and not just more parks. Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood. Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore. We need to do it on purpose
2:41

I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it. It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing. That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents. So how does anyone make money on this? Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province. It wasn’t always there. But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally. Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container. It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter. His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking. But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong. His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi) None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants. Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear) That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI. I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006. Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people.. But I admit that we need to think differently. A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole. I think that’s the work ahead of us now. Not just more factories, and not just more parks. Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood. Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore. We need to do it on purpose

anand mahindra

448,365 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat